Rise Above Burnout: Taking Action with Resilience

Many organizations are starting to think beyond and realizing that a larger change needs to happen. I've certainly been part of those more recently with certain organizations who are more forward-thinking and are thinking about how do we give people the permission to actually refuel and recharge and work in a different, more sustainable way.

It's about cultural permission from the top. There are these structural changes taking place. We are moving from the individual symptomatic to the structural. My sense is that the key to an organization really addressing burnout is understanding these structural changes that are done with policy and then getting really serious about actually how to initiate people. That means taking them on a process where they're unlearning a legacy way of working in corporate environments that actually are fulfilling a lot of addictive needs. So this takes us into a type of leadership development work that is ritualistic in nature. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before?

What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting?

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Ronan, great to see you. Thanks for joining us on Flow Research Collective Radio today.

It's great to be here.

So I want to dive right in. I've been doing my research on you. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. I think you have so many incredible things to share with our collective. So for those— for people who are not familiar with you, you are a speaker on things like resilience, burnout, mental health. So just to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your origin story here and the path that brought you to become a speaker on these topics?

When it comes to origin stories, there's always the question of how deep you go. But, you know, my origin story is rural Ireland in the 1990s. I had— was unfortunately experienced a very early tragedy. My brother was killed in a car accident when I was 4, and I was there when it happened. And I suppose I— it wasn't just the trauma, but it's the idea that when you lose one person in your family, you lose everyone. You lose everyone to grief. And I often say when I'm speaking that rural Ireland in the '90s, there was no Brené Brown back then talking about vulnerability. There was no culture of therapy. There was no mindfulness. So I grew up in a family environment where my dad went back to work 2 days after it happened and my mother's hair started falling out. And I grew up in that. And I share that because, you know, and I'm sure this is a topic that you explore a lot in Flow Research Collective and on your podcast, is just the way trauma and grief and wounding in childhood shapes us. In particular, you know, in the literature, what our compensating strategies are. And when it comes to work and the world of productivity and high performance, you know, there are big compensating strategies around achiever identities where all one knows is how to push through, plow on, and white-knuckle it. And that's very much was my way of coping with a family environment that was in disarray. And the thing about these compensating strategies is that they serve us very well. They take us places. You know, I was a lead futurist to the British Foreign Office when I was 24, writing a report for the British government on the world of 2030. I studied at Oxford. And so these very powerful drives take us places. and there comes a point where, as a default, pushing ourselves beyond our capacities as a way of, on a deeper level, securing our sense of self-worth and safety in the world is going to catch up with us. And it caught up for me about 4 or 5 years ago. I was pushing it hard and working a lot in the systems change space. I was leading the political strategy for an environmental movement called Extinction Rebellion, which in its heyday 4 years ago was a protest movement in 60 cities around the world. It was reframing climate change as an emergency. And I found myself in a way unwittingly as a leader in the national spotlight. I was leading the negotiation strategy with the British government, taking on Boris Johnson, who was then Prime Minister in the media. And on the outside, you know, I was very much cool and calm and collected. And on the inside, I was making some of the biggest cardinal sins when it comes to burnout. I wasn't listening to my body. I was pushing myself beyond my capacity. I was exposing myself to way too much stress. And I was basically blunting the negative feedback that my body was giving me to slow down by numbing and distracting and avoiding with addictions. You know, I would be on a Zoom call with political parties trying to secure the latest piece of a negotiation, and I would turn my video off to pop a Valium to reregulate my nervous system. I would come out of media interviews in Westminster at 11 and be rattled by the intensity of being challenged in the national media and go straight to the pub and have 2 pints. And in a way, what I was doing, unbeknownst to myself, was desperately trying to regulate my nervous system and wasn't really aware of the tools. And that along with, I think, and this I think is also probably a theme that is probably quite salient for your listeners, is pushing the envelope on multiple fronts of my life, you know, in my relationship, exploring open relating and polyamory and really going on my beyond my window of tolerance there in spiritual domains, exploring psychedelics and in a way living out the myth of Icarus flying too close to the sun. And one of the, I think the insights of resilience is that you have to understand that you have a stress budget and you have a window of tolerance and it's unwise to be pushing the envelope on multiple different areas of your life at once. And I think it's something in our particular subculture where we want to maximize our life and live every possible opportunity that comes our way. But it came, the consequences came really thick and fast for me. And, you know, the body is a complex system and I pushed it out of one lifetime equilibrium of health into an equilibrium where, you know, a classic complex chronic health breakdown that I'm living with today. So, you know, even though I try my best to present as a high flyer and being this expert in resilience and I've got a lot of big clients, my daily lived experience is now having a chronic pain condition. I've been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and dealing with a physical system that very much isn't working. And so what I share about resilience doesn't come from doing a PhD in resilience in university. It comes from a personal PhD I've had to do on actually how to get my body back to a level of functionality and how to get myself able to rejoin life and be able to participate in it fully. And along the way, discovering, as you have, a whole wealth of tools to get there.

Ronan, thank you so much for sharing. I think that there's so much there that I want to unpack and go deeper with, but I think I just want to capture that. I think so many people listening to that probably heard such a similar story as their own, right? This idea that in order to be successful, you have to grind, you tune out from your body, your own needs, right? You're, you're chasing, right, the external rewards and you actually become completely out of sync with what you actually need. And you start to talk about window of tolerance that there's no, I think, awareness of what that actually looks looks like and feels like at some point. Never mind using the tools to get back in it. It's first of all, where is it? What does that look like? Right.

And unfortunately, just a small point is that the classic thing, we don't know our boundaries until we've crossed them and we don't know our window of tolerance until we've blown it. And the unfortunate thing when we look at the body as a complex system is that once we erode our buffers or there's a convergence of pressures that overwhelm the brakes on change that maintain that homeostasis, that maintain that equilibrium and that balance. If we're pushed to the edge of chaos and into a new equilibrium, self-reinforcing dynamics keep it in that equilibrium, and it's very hard to shift back out of. And that's why, you know, people who get really severe burnout— and it's important to distinguish between maybe like seasonal exhaustion and burnout— but they find it very difficult to come back out, or they come back with a very diminished capacity. And, you know, I always try and impart when I'm speaking or working with clients that if you don't tend to your wellness in whatever you're doing, you're going to be forced to tend to your illness because it is something that is about as stubborn as the very drive to succeed that created the conditions in the first place.

Absolutely. And it's— I mean, it's a huge reason why, you know, I work with clients not just on resilience but building antifragility, right? We want to actually build and expand capacity to take on stress. If we don't take this more proactive approach, ultimately our capacity is reduced because we go into burnout, right? So incredibly important. I think to your point, to be proactive, to be really intentional about building this rather than get to the point of experiencing tremendous burnout, reduced capacity, and then you're digging yourself out of a hole, right?

Absolutely. And I'm sure this is the analogy that you've also come across is a bodybuilder that's trying to build muscle capacity will do their reps and sets until they feel the burn. That's the muscle fiber tearing and breaking. If they have a particular drive of going beyond that, they don't get to come back in 3 days after a recovery window to rebuild the muscle. They get to sit it out for 2 or 3 weeks. And it's a similar idea in resilience. Often when I speak to, you know, organizations, I teach on the KPMG Leadership Program and I was speaking to Deloitte a couple of weeks ago, is that when you come in as someone who's cautioning people about burnout or teaching about resilience, there is this fear amongst the listener that they no longer will be able to push the envelope on their life. And What we're looking for is optimal performance. And optimal performance actually has a virtue that is missing in our society, which is sobriety. You are actually sober and about your physical capacities, your mental capacities. You try and understand what your window of tolerance is and capacity is through the feedback mechanisms of the body. And you also work to, as you say, expand that capacity so that you're continually titrating up to greater levels of performance. Whereas I think What we have culturally is because we're often operating from unintegrated wounding and trauma and really deep-seated desperate attempts to prove our sense of worth in the world or just simply to survive economically depending on where we are on the rung of the ladder, is that we're in basically a boom-bust cycle. We're booming into these very short windows where we have an incredible day or even an incredible week, and then our capacity is gone for 3 weeks. And we're basically yo-yoing and pinballing around the system of our capacity. Rather than being sober and modest and intentional, but gradually improving in a really great direction that has compound interest over time.

Yeah, yeah. No, we talk about mastering the concept of oscillation. So you, you need stress to promote that positive adaptation, to expand your capacity, uh, to drive supercompensation, if you will, if you're talking about, you know, weightlifting. Uh, but then you need to oscillate to those periods of deep recovery to actually gain the benefits from putting yourself under stress, right? That's what really builds to peak performance. It's oscillation. You know, we talk about that the enemy to performance isn't stress, it's linearity, that failure to oscillate to periods of recovery. So yeah, it sounds like we're in complete alignment with our messaging, which is great.

Yeah, it is good. And you know, when I'm giving my talks, I often give people a screenshot of what my working week looks like on the week I'm giving my talk. And I do time segmenting and kind of color coding what I'm doing to optimize my day. But the color that I draw their attention to is yellow, and my week is filled with yellow. And yellow is my renewal moments that compensate for my periods of exertion. And so we're really trying to follow the cadence of a heartbeat or a wave, this cadence between exertion and renewal, exertion, renewal. And that both takes place on a daily basis with microbreaks. Breaks on a weekly basis with scheduling in these activities. You know, the, the one of the leading researchers on burnout, um, uh, Joe Petrie, he is a research consortium in New Zealand, um, but he told— he, from his interviews with high performers, he looks at the phenomenon of people who are able to be in incredibly intense environments, you know, hospital A&E departments, financial traders that are working 14 hours a day. And the thing that allows them to do that for a decade or longer is that they have what's called an opposite world. They have a thing that they where they go from the cerebral, goal-oriented, instrumentalized self to something that's much more soft and embodied and intrinsic that just takes them away. And so we're trying to schedule them in ideally with friends or basically people who would be pissed off if you said no to them, because we know that when the digital avalanche of requests comes in, we'll tend to blow off whatever that yellow thing in the diary is that says I need to go for a walk. This is why dogs are great. When they're barking to be taken for a walk, they're not gonna be told no. So I think a lot of, a lot of the actual daily practice of what we're talking about is in building these commitment devices where we're obliged to take rest and allow that to take precedence over incoming requests, often from people who are above us in the hierarchy, our clients, our bosses. That will mean that we'll capitulate and we will go with the urgent request that's required of us. Rather than this long-term commitment to health and performance.

Yeah, we, we make the same recommendations in our program Zero to Dangerous. So we talk about scheduling in those recovery breaks, making them rocks in your schedule that everything else, you know, moves around them. Those are the non-negotiables. And, you know, some of the kind of gold standard recommendations we make is, you know, a 90-minute work block. If that's your flow block, follow it with a 15 to 20-minute micro recovery and then get at least a 60-minute block most days of the week. And if you can, one full day dedicated to recovery, active recovery as well.

Yeah, it's interesting. There's obviously a lot of parallels in what I recommend and also what I find. And I have like a particular Ronan theory. It's yet to be peer-reviewed by anyone, but it's the idea that we work like we drink. And obviously some of your listeners may not drink, but broadly speaking, we live inside a drinking culture where alcohol is something that's very prevalent. And the, what I often say is that, you know, many of us will go out on a night out, we'll have an intention to have a drink or two, and then we'll have the drink or two, our inhibitions will be down, and then all of a sudden we have 3 or 4, we're stumbling home a bit tipsy, we wake up with a hangover and, you know, it's not our first rodeo. It's not like we haven't gotten hungover before. I mean, like, how have I done this again? And so we know intellectually that to avoid getting a hangover and experiencing that pain, we need to schedule in, not schedule in, we just need to alternate between water and alcohol. We need to pace ourselves. We need to know the one that's one too many. And yet when we're up and running and we're drinking and we're in the bar, all of that goes out the window and we're just on one. And I think we work in a similar way where intellectually we might have done a Zero to Dangerous course, might have experienced a talk from me. We know that we need to do these ultradian cycles of 90 minutes and have recovery and really be optimizing us. But there's something about about being in work mode where you're kind of basically in boss mode, you're getting shit done, and there's something really compulsive about that. And even though you know you're supposed to schedule in these rest and renewal moments, that just flies out the window. And then, you know, 24/7 social mobile technology keeps us there. It's like having a pub in your pocket where there's always an opportunity to have another drink. And then I think where it gets really pernicious is that organizations play into that, often sometimes in cynical ways, often in unconscious ways. But rather than the organization being, you know, the well-meaning friend that passes you the glass of water and says, hey mate, you should have a drink of water, you're getting a bit steamed, instead says, hey, let's do a shot at the bar. And, you know, I, I talk a lot about endurance culture, which is a term that a mental resilience company, Tough Cookie, have first coined. I was working with them previously, and it's that idea that actually on a broader level, the organizations that we're working in are feeding this push-through, plow-on, white-knuckle it. And even though they intellectually know or are coming across these theories of exertion and renewal and optimization, it all flies out the window. And I think it comes at the level of compulsion and the stress, the tasks that we face. And when all of that's happening, you know, in the kind of the psychology vernacular, our adaptive child comes online and our instinctive responses just to kind of react and push through come on rather than the functional adult who is more sober and is, is able to stick to the plan and stick to the process. So I, I'm super curious, even with a kind of a cursory familiarity with kind of the kind of content that is explored on Zero to Dangerous, what you've talked about here, and also your coaching, how do you stop people from drifting into that scenario that I've just described? And also, do you see that? Or actually— Oh yeah.

Oh, 100%. We see it because I think, you know, I think compulsion is the right word to be using because you get that hit of dopamine that, you know, I'll just answer one more email, I'll cross out one more thing for my to-do list, and you get that hit of dopamine. It's— there's an immediate kind of reward there to keep going. And so I think clear goals are a huge tool that I, that I use with clients and calendar optimization. If you've blocked out in your calendar, you have very clear finish lines so you can win each task block. There's less of a compulsion to just kind of haphazardly add another thing. You've actually prioritized what's high value. How do I win on those. So you've contained and you're getting, I think, a higher value dopamine hit, um, instead of those kind of low value. Yeah. So I think that that can, that can reduce— I call it some of that kind of half-working gray zone behavior too, of I should be taking a lunch break but I'm also going to be answering emails on my phone while I have a fork in the other hand kind of behavior, right? So I think that that can help help curb some of that. Um, I also think that a real— some serious work on redefining what productivity actually is, right? Is it busyness or is it progress? Um, and I think differentiating the two so that it, it starts to curb that go, go, go, I'm just— I just need to be doing something mentality, and adding in things like recovery is part of the work here. Recovery is part of being a peak performer. Refueling is actually extremely high value if I want to be productive. So I think there's, there's some work and the mindset around productivity to do for this to be sustainable as well.

I love it. I love it. I think it's great. It reminds me a lot of Oliver Burkeman's book 4,000 Weeks. And, you know, the idea that a lot of the busyness and performative busyness Actually is trying to keep a deeper sense of anxiety, existential anxiety about how do I even use my day? How do I spend my time? I'd be, if I'm not just kind of crushing through this to-do list, doesn't really matter what it is, or if it's even remotely advancing the goals of my life or the strategies I have, it keeps me from a certain degree of restlessness. And I, and actually I think that that there's a wider systemic factor that compounds that, which is, um, I suppose the absence of good containers in which to work. You know, often, you know, we're working from home, um, and, you know, like, for example, if I look at like some of the, the better new co-working spaces, they have, you know, spaces for solo deep focus work, they've got some co-working to get that sense of a vibe that you can feed off, they also have a climbing wall, or they have something that you can do. Whereas I think when you're working from I'm home often, it's like, well, you know, I'm in the south of the UK, it's pissing raining outside, it's gray. What am I gonna do? Am I, what, I'm gonna go out? I've got, I've got, I've nothing to do. So I might as well just default to at least think this thing that is giving me little morsels of dopamine. It isn't like the hugely satisfying dopamine hit of this idea of achieving my goal at the finish line that you just spoke about, which I love. But there is something where our broader environments, the lack of a tribal context in which we're working, which obviously can distract us, also means that we, we often don't have good alternatives to work. And so we, we end up kind of, uh, grazing in the gray zone, basically.

No, that's a great point. And, and so there is work to do in terms of what— where are there other activities or things in my life that will actually give me perhaps flow? So having a primary flow activity that is not work, that is not monetized. And also, what What are, what are active recovery protocols that refuel me that are really meaningful that I can enjoy and engage in? And I think some of it does take some creativity. It's not as simple as if you're, you know, in a cold, you know, wet, you know, dismal climate. Um, I just had a client, you know, in the Pacific Northwest that was like, I can't go outside. Like, it's depressing outside. What— I'm stuck inside. What do I do for recovery? In the summer, this is very easy. But so you do need to spend some time kind of exploring and being curious about what recovery could look like in a variety of context so that when you are working in that space, you don't have to think about it. It needs to be something that you can roll right into and execute on, or you end up, I might as well just answer a few more emails, right? You have to reduce the friction there. So it does require some kind of pre-planning and some exploration.

Yeah, I mean, I think about the things that really give me these deep renewal moments. And they're— they often come in the evening, later in the week, you know, so like, I love choir, I love singing in groups, and then and the vibe and how good that is for my body and my soul. I love dancing and like 5 rhythms and those kind of things, but they often come in the evening and in the middle of the day it's just a little bit disjointed. So I'd be curious about if we were to role play you coaching me and you telling me, okay, like what can I do given that there isn't a ready-made collective experience to tap into when you're living in the sticks in the UK?

Sure. I mean, my, my first go-to is, do you have any other humans or pets around? So, you know, I think pets are, pets are a great source of, you know, aim. So one of the active recovery protocols that is really, I think, underutilized as adults is aimless play or belly laughing, right? So children, pets, great for both of those. Because again, you know, one of the, features of really solid active recovery practices are you're getting your mind off of work, right? You're creating a cognitive shift. So it's not enough to just get up and walk away from your computer and walk around your house a bit, right? If you're still thinking about the work, right? So something that's going to help you disengage with that. And then also, I love, you know, you were talking earlier about being more embodied, right? So is there an activity that you can do where you can get out of your head and into your body? A bit more, right? So, you know, light stretching, foam rolling, things like that.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. It's, um, it's on my list to get a dog, uh, after— I'm— I still haven't moved in with my, uh, my partner yet, so we're waiting for that moment. But yeah, I definitely am looking forward to that.

Yeah, perfect, perfect. I wanna— so I want to go back to something you said earlier because I do think it's really important, and this is a point of confusion I think for many, um, which is the difference between burnout and being exhausted, right? Burnout is kind of this messy spectrum. So what's your take or what's your definition, I guess, first of all, on burnout and how do you tell the difference between just burnout and exhaustion?

Yeah, I think it's a really difficult one. Burnout is a syndrome. So syndromes are words and labels put on a collection of symptoms that are broadly in the family of the syndrome. And what I, you know, I think like a very simple rule of thumb is, and a way of kind of rule of thumb checking is if you're feeling like, oh, I don't know if I'm exhausted or burnt out, try taking a weekend where you are free from obligations and you really deeply rest. You know, you don't just kind of rest in the way we traditionally culturally rest, which is fill our social life with activities, but do things that are very much being in a zone of stillness for the body, really resting deeply, sleeping as much as you can, recharging the batteries. Obviously, there are things that will nourish us like social connections and being in nature. And just see how you are at the end of that weekend. And if you feel the sense of, oh yeah, okay, I'm back to myself, I'm feeling engaged, I'm feeling motivated, I'm feeling somewhat revitalized, then that's more an idea that actually you were situationally exhausted from from a difficult work project or challenging circumstances in your life. If you're engaging in that type of rest and the batteries just aren't filled up, there's a deeper sense of malaise and tiredness, that would be an indicator to me that you have lost functionality and a deeper protocol of restoring the system is required. So that's a general layman's rule of thumb of differentiating. And sometimes you might want to say, okay, I've tried a weekend when is the next moment when I can take a full week to do this and, and, and get a deeper sense of rest? I think burnout is very much a physiological phenomenon. So where we need to look at is the allostatic load, which is the cumulative physiological burden of stress in the body that comes from chronic overextension, chronic stress, anxiety. And when you look at, you know, the effects of stress on the body, you know, you have everything from the immune system being depleted and us being more prone to flus and colds, our microbiome being dysregulated, which is bad for our digestion and our absorption of nutrients, but also our mood via the gut-brain axis and our engagement in life, which has its own spillover effect of doing less of the things that are good for us. You know, the effect it has with chronic inflammation and loss of capacity for the mitochondria. And so I would say burnout is a physiological phenomenon where actually some of the major core organs and functions of the body are depleted and compromised, and it is akin to a type of physical depletion and disease rather than, I think, how it's kind of culturally understood, which is a general sense of disengagement and malaise and kind of a cynical detachment from work. These are obviously symptoms of how the physical depletion makes us feel about the source of our depletion. It would be very natural that you would feel cynical and detached from an organization that has done that to your body or be disengaged. But there isn't an easy way of identifying that. You can obviously do your classic blood tests and stool tests and just get a general reading of like, how are the metrics of my body? How are they doing? So there is no hard and fast rule. I think the more interesting thing is that because we live in a broader culture where being tired all the time, being frazzled and exhausted is normalized and kind of everyone's tired all the time. It's very rare that when you're checking in with someone, they're like, hey, I'm full of the joys of life. I'm like completely revitalized and re-energized. I was in a car yesterday and a friend hopped in and one of my other friends in the car turned around and said, oh, how are you doing? And they said, I'm actually okay. And I think this is just a sign of the times that we put actually in front Surprisingly, yeah. I'm actually fine. I think broadly things in my life are going good. I think, fingers crossed, maybe not tomorrow. And so we're living in this, you know, and I think that's downstream from just an overexposure to increased volatility in the world and complexity. But because of that, we're actually unable to differentiate between when we're situationally exhausted from a project and actually when we're in the danger zone of burnout and we're actually eroding the physical buffers that uphold a baseline level of energy and ability to engage with the world. And there is no particular marker about that apart from listening to your body, slowing down. And then if you listen to it enough and restore it enough, you're able to reengage. But with burnout, you know, you can often be out for 9 months, a year, 2 years when it's really severe.

I think that that's a tremendously helpful framing for people that, because I think that, you know, I hear from people all the time, they talk about burnout, like it's this like bad word that it's some sign that they're soft and they couldn't handle their role. And there's such a negative stigma around burnout that I think that, you know, anchoring people in, this is actually, you know, there's a lot happening with your physiology here that's driving some of those psychological symptoms, but that, you know, the, the origin story of burnout is there is a massive amount of depletion, um, and you're on the physiological side of the house that, you know, there's no, uh, there's no shame in, in feeling that way, right? There's— it's actually extremely counterproductive to just kind of be carrying on in the throes of burnout, um, because all you're doing is further eroding that capacity. You're just digging that hole deeper and deeper.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Thanks for listening to Flow Research Collective Radio. Before we dive back into our conversation, there's something to consider. It may be that today we are under-challenged. We're drowning in comfort. Now, in his book Antifragile, statistician Nassim Taleb pointed out something that's of key importance. Quote, undercompensation from the absence of challenge degrades the best of the best. The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Now put another way, who we could be, or our highest potential, is squandered by safety, coddled by comfort. If you want to train with us at the Flow Research Collective, it will require boldness. But what's life without a little adventure, right? To learn more about how you can get more flow in your life and achieve your professional and personal goals in less time and with more ease, go to getmoreflow.com.

Com.

If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with you. All the best.

Exactly. And, you know, Christina Balazs, she's a professor emeritus of sociology at University of Berkeley, uh, and she is one of the leading, uh, thinkers on burnout. And, you know, one of the first, uh, uh, analogies she draws is, is the canary in the coal mine. You know, you're, you're in conditions that by definition are depleting. And then that problem is compounded by a social stigma around acknowledging that depletion or internalizing that depletion as a moral failure that you can't keep up with the game when the game is rigged against you. It's designed to burn you out. This is the issue when we have working in companies that are within a shareholder capitalism framework. There is that need for growth on growth to protect an advanced market. Position that mixes with often nuclear family environments where, you know, two people are holding the burden of raising a family together and parents live far away, and you just have these massively compounding pressures. I think what's interesting is if you look at the, the stats on burnout, generally they're hovering at 40% of workers globally are often or always in self-reported surveys burnt out, which which is a crazy, crazy number. And in a way, you know, we're in the age of mass burnout. And yet at the same time, there doesn't seem to be a political willingness. And when I say political, I mean both at a governmental level and amongst organizations to actually look at that and ask itself how it restructures its work. I think that most of the innovation around restructuring is only possible when you have a high degree of agency over your life if you've got a profitable business, if you're maybe the CEO of the company or even level of leadership. But often people are stuck inside systems where it's designed to burn you out. Your outside life with cost of living crises and mortgage rates doubling and everything is also stressful. And the organization's answer to that is to throw in some Wellbeing Wednesdays and to give you some trips on how to breathe well, which is cynical at best and foolish forest. We are yet to have this conversation about how we move beyond what I call cosmetic resilience, where we'll just hopefully give you these tools and maybe the problem will go away, to actually understanding how our work experience is leading us there. And it's really tricky. It's tricky to be in an environment where you have career goals and ambitions, you want to manage the impressions of others, you're afraid if you'll say no you're going to be outcompeted and outpromoted by someone who will say yes, you're up for a performance review you in 6 months, what do you do if you're burnt out? You know, do you— most people just try and hide it, try and manage it on the sidelines, and they're making it worse. So I think this is where we get into, and I've definitely noticed a shift myself, you know, when I'm working with clients, where we're moving beyond individual capacity building and strategies at the individual level to actually how do you to design environments? What is the culture that an organization has, needs to have? What are the policies that an organization needs to have to actually protect its people purely from this perspective of its own self-interest, of maximizing shareholder value, of being able to attract and retain a workforce? So I think we're at the very beginnings of quite an exciting conversation about systemic cultural burnout.

I couldn't agree with you more. And I think that these competing commitments are so incredibly real. I mean, I think it— they put people in what feels like an impossible situation where they just ultimately just have to keep going. And yeah, I think that something that— something you just said about the kind of like the performative Wellbeing Wednesdays, and I think that we actually are— many organizations are starting to think beyond that and realizing that a larger change needs to happen. I've certainly been part of those more recently with certain organizations who are more forward-thinking and are thinking about how do we give people the permission to actually refuel and recharge and work in a different, more sustainable way? Because ultimately, that is when they are more likely to be performing at the top of their potential. That's when they're more efficient. That's when they're more strategic. That's when they're more innovative and creative. So I think some organizations are starting to get there, but we're— it's early days, so, but I'm optimistic.

Yeah, I'm also seeing that as well. I think you've captured it perfectly. It's about cultural permission from the top. And I am also seeing that, you know, there's things like collective downtime and protected days from meetings and being serious about, you know, meeting. I think meetings have increased 272% since the pandemic. Protecting people's space so they're not distracted all the time, having lots of flexibility. So are there these structural changes taking place? You know, the largest trial into a 4-day work week took place in the UK and finished, and 100% of the companies are keeping it going. So we are moving from the individual symptomatic to the structural. There is a really key barrier, and the key barrier is that, you know, a chief people officer who is really well-meaning, who gets that, you know, we have to address the root cause, has put out this really good strategy to address the structures, the architecture of the workflow to make sure that people aren't burnt out. And then what happens is that the people— we're a herd species, we take our cue from who's above us in the hierarchy, and we see basically the people who are high up in the hierarchy or who are advancing, who are basically doing the very opposite. So they are engaging in all of the behaviors that are designed to burn them out. And, you know, Deloitte, there's an interesting podcast from Deloitte and their Wellbeing Insights team about the idea of toxic rock stars. So these people who bring in the big bucks and are driving the company forward, but are ultimately firing off texts at 11 on a Saturday night. And the answer is like the answer in an elite kitchen culture, it's yes, chef. It was like 10 minutes ago, you were supposed to say yes. And there's a particular— people get high off that way of working. It's so all-consuming. And so my sense is that the key to an organization really addressing burnout is understanding these structural changes that are done with policy and then getting really serious about actually how to initiate people managers or above into role modeling resilient behaviors. And that means taking them on a process where they're unlearning a legacy way of working in corporate environments that actually are fulfilling a lot of addictive needs. And on some level, the role, not just being the director of sales, but being on a deeper level, the guardian of a cultural value. And so this takes us into a type of leadership development work that I would almost say is ritualistic in nature. It's initiating people from a way of being that they have only known all their life into a new way of being. It's almost like a rite of passage. And I think that that's the most exciting part of leadership development work and the work that I'm most interested in doing out with clients is that I love that.

I'm smiling because this is exactly the drum that I've been beating as well. You know, we have organizations come, we have a Baseline to Beyond program where we train teams and organizations. And a very common question, once they learn a little bit about what we train people to do, the skill sets that we're, that we're teaching people, is who should go through our training first? And my answer is always ways, the leadership. The leaders have to be the ones modeling this behavior. And it is going to be such an uncomfortable process because the people that train with us are high-performing, really successful people. And the way that they've gotten to, you know, their station in life, the, the rung on the ladder is through these deeply unsustainable habits and practices that, you know, so I tell people, you're going to have to break a lot of the things that have quote unquote been working for you, right? They feel like they've been working, because you're a high-performing person, but they're not what's going to carry you to the next rung. Not, not in a sustainable way. If you want to actually crack the ceiling and truly level up again and again and again, it's going to require a different skillset, a different set of habits, a different set of practices. And that can be really hard to wrap your head around, right? Because you have to break that, you know, the busyness and the 100% grind every day, you know, rest is for the week, I'll sleep when I'm dead mentality. It's a real paradigm shift for a lot of people.

Yeah, and I agree with that. It's what I'm trying to bring as well. And I'm also trying to steelman the argument against that. There was a really interesting roundtable in New York that happened last week with US executives, senior executives. It was covered by, again, someone from the Deloitte Wellbeing Insights team. And, you know, generally the narrative was about, you know, we need to shift our way of working. We need to, you know, understand that what got us there won't get us to the next chapter. And I think one CEO put his hand up and said, I'm sorry, but I'm just gonna say it. Like, the reason that I'm in this position is because I've sacrificed my evenings and weekends for two decades. This is why I'm there. And this is why the other colleagues who would like to be in my position aren't there. And everyone was like nodding their heads and being like, yeah, like absolutely. This is how it's done. And on one level, it has gotten to where they want to be. And once you get to that level of seniority with that, both that flexibility and that autonomy, and obviously this huge responsibility, but also the wealth that brings, that buys you a lot of extra capacity and buffer in your life. You know, you get to go on that ski trip on a whim on a week that is your deep renewal flow state that people lower in the hierarchy don't get to go on. So even though I know intellectually that there is, and I totally agree with you, that there is this more productive, high-impact way of working, I often find when I work with senior leaders, senior vice presidents of Fortune 500 companies, they generally are people that just have a lot of capacity. They have big shoulders, they're able to take a lot. And I do wonder whether they actually are dispositionally suited to a way of working that is, as you know, I shared before this tough word, endurance culture. They're just marathon runners. And at this stage, is it possible to teach an old dog new tricks? For a particular generation, I do think that once you get into early Gen X, Gen Y, I think that people are really understanding on a different value set level the need to change for themselves. But a lot of companies are run by late Gen X boomers who are, this is just foreign and alien to them. And I'm curious Basically, I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical of this new argument that is a different way to work when, you know, they aren't experiencing major health crises. They've kind of gotten to their position and they're broadly doing well and they're in their comfort zone. And so you're trying to appeal to them to set a new cultural tone so everyone else in the organization isn't following in their lead and burning out. But in terms of the personal case and the appeal, you know, they, they have proven to themselves that they've gotten there by a particular way of working. So I'm not expecting, you know, an answer to that in response, but just to be kind of— to— for us and the listeners to be aware that this is actually a tough nut to crack, this shift that we're talking about.

I think it's a tremendously tough nut to crack, but I do think that there is— you know, I think that some of these people who are older, they're later in their careers, it's going to be challenging because they are breaking habits that they've had for a very long time. However, I think that they have some skin in the game in terms of as you age, your capacity and skill set also changes, right? And so I think that in order to have a long career, to be able to kind of get after it like you used to, right? I hear that a lot, right? Oh, I noticed that my endurance isn't there. I'm not as sharp later in the day. Um, you know, something tells me I maybe need to take a little bit longer of a lunch or, right? Like people start to notice that their stamina, sometimes, you know, lags or different things that maybe are not feeling as sharp as they used to. This is their why, right? Okay. If you want to get after it and be, you know, top dog longer later into your career, then adapting and building in some of these practices like active recovery is going to expand your cognitive surplus, right? Your ability to be a more strategic accurate decision maker from a place of leadership, right? That's incredibly important when you're, you know, in the C-suite to be making these accurate decisions. And so I think that that's, I think, where you can build a little bit more of a why.

Yeah, I think, I think you're right. I said, you know, I'm, I'm really curious about, like, particularly these, like, you know, really old world leaders like Joe Biden, I don't know if he's turned 80 yet, but in his 80s, Xi Jinping, I think is turning 70. I'm really curious whether they follow these active recovery protocol ways of working that you're championing or that they are of a different stock and a different generation. I don't know. If I was in the position and I saw my cognitive capacity and my physical capacity slowing down, I would be extremely motivated to understand what what the new way is. But I do wonder whether, you know, in the way that often people who rise in hierarchies and industries that are kind of very adversarial in nature, like the way politics is a blood sport, there are people who are neurodivergent and they're just able to, you know, we talk, they talk about, you know, how very senior leaders can often have low levels of psychopathy that allows them to actually in a detached way take huge, hugely morally vexing things that would absolutely savage someone that was more emotionally dispositioned. And I just wonder whether there is a particular bias of people who just have enormous capacity to go on in the old way. I don't know, but I'd be curious to get your thoughts on that.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fair question, but one of our kind of mantras at the Flow Research Collective is personality doesn't scale, biology scales. And so if we know from, you know, a neurophysiological, neurochemical perspective that these practices are going to expand your cognitive capacity, they're going to make it less likely for you to become physiologically depleted, then, you know, that's, that's the recommendation is let's not count on like us having some type of personality that is going to be an advantage. Maybe that's true, but we're more sure that the physiology scales, right? So, so I want to, I wanna make sure we're, we're giving the listeners some, I think, tangible recommendations. So from an individual perspective, I'd love to hear maybe what are some of your recommendations to fight burnout, any kind of neuroscience-based tools that you typically recommend, any go-tos on your end?

Hmm. I think that the, And this is a boring response, but I think that resilience begins when we fully reckon with what it is we've been doing to ourselves. And there is a very boring, mundane slowing down and developing an awareness of what we're doing and whether actually we are defaulting to a very sympathetic nervous system, overextension, shallow breathing, clinging, grasping, cramming, habit energy and understanding that whether we're burnt out or not, that is just a recipe for burnout. And to get more into the habit of putting my feet on the ground, reattuning to the— basically what you do in somatic experiencing therapy and trauma therapy when the nervous system is traumatized and you're trying to bring it back to safety is actually slowing down and coming into this reorientation and intentionality. With what we're doing. So that's the kind of the long game. That's the practice that I think needs to be cultivated of understanding this idea of how much I'm extending. In terms of, because I'm aware that your listeners are probably very tuned in with a lot of the basics, I am doing a lot of research and also have in my own life because of my own health and the needing to put in extra input put, big believer in oxygen therapy, in particular high-intensity interval training with an oxygen machine, which is just really, you know, so, so basically you, you do intermittent, so high-intensity interval training on a bike where you're doing a 2-minute interval on basically hypoxic, so 14% oxygen. And that basically increases the cellular demand for energy and for oxygen. And then you flip the switch and you go to 85% oxygen. So if people have, are really interested in high performance and they want to invest, then I think high-intensity interval training combined with oxygen is a phenomenal way of increasing your capacity. I'm also really big on photobiomodulation therapy, which is the fancy word for red light therapy. But there's some great science behind that on its ability to get the mitochondria cells to rid itself of excess nitrous oxide, which depletes its capacity and improve ATP production in the body. So there may be 2, 2 things that potentially aren't on the radar in the way that fasting and cold water exposure and Wim Hof are more in the public consciousness. I think that if you really, you know, you talk about this framing of the executive athlete, if you really want to get into that high levels of athleticism, then these are some of the interventions that I would recommend, particularly when you're in positions of real responsibility, when you just have to draw on a way bigger capacity than you might traditionally have.

Yeah, those are fantastic recommendations. I'm glad I, I'm glad I asked. I also wanna highlight, you know, kind of how you started that answer because I saw you post the other day and I wanna, I'm gonna quote you here 'cause I loved it. I'm gonna be sharing this with lots of our clients. It's, boundary setting isn't about saying no, it's about slowing down your yes. Right? So I love that, that really just elevating how intentional you are about what you're adding to your plate. I think that's huge. I think a lot of people here, boundary setting and I just have to say no all the time. I think being more thoughtful about elimination and also just being strategic about what a priority is.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And what I would say within that is that we're actually honing in on the moment of the request, which often will come from a colleague we feel obliged to a boss whose impression we want to manage, a client who we want to make sure we're in their good books. And when that request comes in, the instinct, it will on some level dysregulate us if we're like, I can't really do this, but I can't say no. And so all we're doing there is we're not saying no. That's the liberating thing. You don't have to say no to the request. You don't also have to acquiesce immediately. We're just slowing down down that kind of dysregulating window in which the adaptive child will come online and just say, oh, I can't handle the discomfort of having to say no to this person. And we're just saying, hey, I'm going to check in with my team and get back to you. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And then in that window, you can really check in with yourself because often just what happens is we say yes and we don't have capacity. So we underdeliver and we start breaking agreements and we start undermining relationships. Or there's a spillover effect with creating tension and drama at home or with their family or their spouse. So either way, the cost will come somewhere in the system. And so you better be clear on what you're saying yes and what you're saying no to.

Yeah, and I think, you know, we were talking earlier about how, you know, these competing commitments are even more challenging to deal with when you have less agency and less autonomy in your position. So I think that this is a really helpful moment to be thinking about if you are a leader as well, the position that you're putting your team in, when you're asking for something. And even from a leadership perspective, encouraging them to slow down their response, maybe take some time. I think this is a really actionable zone for leaders to be more aware around, right?

Absolutely. And, you know, in that post, I talked about if you're a people manager position, if you're an executive, and you ask someone, and it's similar to, you know, consent in the realm of relating and sexuality. It's like if if it isn't a really strong enthusiastic yes, it might be a no, and it's worth checking in again and making sure that you're respecting the person's consent. So we're trying to take that culture that we're seeing in that subculture and take it into the workplace. And if I ask someone, it's late in the evening, they're like, yeah, sure. And I'm like, you know, you have to be aware that, you know, often boundary setting is incredibly difficult for people and you're in a position of power in this dynamic. And to say, I just wanna check in again, are you sure that it's a yes? Do you wanna take some time? And, you know, often we, we just want them to say yes and get it on with and get that task out of our head to relieve our own anxiety. So it's a real invitation into a much more considerate leadership that reaps enormous dividends in your staff feeling that they can be real around you and they feel safe. And, and that's where loyalty and, and great teamwork grows from.

Yeah, I love that. So we've talked about kind of modeling these different behaviors from a place of leadership. Are there any other recommendations that you have kind of at the organizational level organizational level to reduce burnout right now?

I think measuring is really important. We, in, in the latest research, only 1% of organizations are actually measuring the well-being of their staff beyond these yearly or 6-monthly surveys. If you don't have a good metric for resilience, so, you know, one of the people I partner with is the Resilience Institute who have a resilience diagnostic. We're getting really granular on how your staff are doing. Because if you're, you know, a chief people officer, if you're on some level responsible for people and performance, you need to have a really good map of how burnt out your workforce are and be able to zone in on your burnout hotspots and prioritize your budgets there. You need to think about if 40% of workers globally are burnt out, you're hiring 40% of the people you're hiring are already burnt out. Like, that's crazy when you think about it. You know, I was, my sister works in talent development and psychometrics and selection and assessment. And I think that this is a huge area that we're not talking about is hiring people that aren't actually fit for the job. And what are the ethical dilemmas of that in the way that, you know, there's discriminatory protections in place for not hiring people because they have mental health issues. But if there's a basic physiological, you're physiologically competent, compromised, how does an organization understand that, and what kind of onboarding pathway looks like that could potentially be as enlightened as to help them recover from burnout if they're actually willing to invest in that person long term. This is particularly the case when it comes to executive hires. There's a great thinker, Navid Naziaman, who's written a book called Mastering Executive Transitions, and how very senior hires can make the first 80 months of their role go very well and how the company can support them. And the cost of a failed senior hire is 10 to 30 times higher than their yearly salary. So you're looking at a multi-million pound loss if you've hired a senior vice president, uh, and they don't work. And I can guarantee you that understanding the degree to which they're burnt out is a big factor in that equation.

Yeah, that's huge. I, I love that. And I, I think it's an incredibly important question to be asking. I also I also think that just from an organizational perspective, knowing what your burnout hotspots are, what are the triggers to burnout in your organization, not just who is burnt out, but what are the triggers? What, you know, that's driving, um, the causes of burnout are so— it's vital. And something I hear from, uh, organizations regularly are, you know, people love to work here. Like people feel really passionate about their jobs. And, you know, my response is that's amazing, right? Like, that's fuel for peak performance, passion, curiosity, feeling like you're leveraging your strengths. But it doesn't protect you from being burnt out. Like, they could— they can love their job and still be burnt out and incredibly physically depleted. And I think that those dots are not always being connected.

They're not. And there is a shadow to that, you know, feeling like my work is my family and feeling an overwhelming sense of purpose. You know, I had it in the own environmental movement that I had a leadership role in. It is its own way of disassociating from the negative sides of your job because you're so committed to the narrative that you love working here. Like, ultimately, it is very simple. If you look again at the research on burnout, 73% of people, the highest attribution of the cause of their burnout is workload. I mean, yeah, no-brainer. And actually, one of the best interventions that an organization can do is in the technical training of their people managers and their executives is give them proper training in workforce planning. It's such a missing, highly technical, very mundane and boring aspect that if upstream you aren't anticipating the demands of the job, how you want to scale by revenue, and you're not putting in place the roles that are needed, ultimately someone is going to end up doing the role of 1.5 people, 2 people, or 3 people, and that's just your recipe for burnout. Nick Petri, who I mentioned previously, the who's leading the research in the New Zealand Consortium, his question about with 40% of people burnt out, why is it that some people burn out and some people don't? And he says that it's actually about a convergence of factors. It's never one thing. And so it's about having multiple risk factors that are converging. So it's, you know, an unconscious belief that I have to endure no matter what, I won't show weakness, along with an unsupportive boss, along with the lack of resources at a team level. And when you have 3 or more, that's when you have a recipe for burnout. And so organizations need to look at the risk factors for burnout and see where in the organization are there actually convergences, uh, and that's where they need to put their energy and attention.

Such an incredible recommendation. Uh, well, Ronan, I'm conscious of time here. Uh, before we go, if you would, I'm sure people are deeply intrigued now and wanna hear more from you. So where can they find you?

Uh, they can find me, ronanharrington.co is my website. There's lots of videos of me speaking about burnout Resilience, and also on LinkedIn, Ronan Harrington. I'm sure if you type it in, you'll find me.

Perfect. We'll put those in the show notes as well. Thank you again for sharing your time. This was an incredible conversation. It's been a thrill to, to get to pick your brain a little bit. So, so thank you.

Yeah, my pleasure.

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